Empower Leadership Academy For Women

TeamWomen is hosting a Special Half Day Empower Leadership Academy for professional women!

TeamWomen members and friends will get to experience the work we’re doing with kids in the community alongside Coaches Kiara Buford, Peyton Owens, Julieta Piox, Laura Boyd and Kristina Graber. From cultivating leadership to mastering your mindset, the day will be grounded in Empower’s four pillars: Leadership, Confidence, Resilience, and Well-being. Discover the power of this proprietary curriculum that inspires, develops, and empowers the next generation of female leaders!

Meet Our Empower Coaches

Kiara Buford | Director of Alumni Relations/NIL- University of Minnesota

Former Collegiate Gopher Basketball star,  Kiara Buford recently returned to the University of Minnesota as Director of Alumni Relations. Prior to this, she was a Behavior Interventionist at Roseville High School for nine years, helping students seek success in their high school experience by building relationships, setting goals, and developing a positive community.  In addition to her full time career, she dedicates time as an Empower Leadership Academy and ON Point Elite Leadership Coach.

Peyton N. Owens, III | Senior Associate Athletics Director, Leadership and Inclusion

Peyton Owens is in his 18th year with Golden Gopher Athletics. He currently oversees Golden Gopher Baseball & Rowing, Student-Athlete Development (all education provided to student-athletes, including career readiness, personal development, community outreach, and risk reduction), and Diversity & Inclusion. Owens has been instrumental in the vision and implementation of Leadership U, which he has had oversight of since its launch. This collaboration with Land O’Lakes Inc. provides leadership development and emotional intelligence education and support to student-athletes, assistant coaches, head coaches, and athletics staff. To support this initiative and others like it, he is responsible for cultivating, soliciting, and stewarding donors for endowment and annual support of Leadership U, the W.I.L.L. program (Women Invested in Leadership and Learning), and more. Owens is also an ambassador for athletics on campus, bringing the voice of Golden Gopher Athletics to several critical groups. He is a member of the campus Equity & Diversity Subcommittee and is a Member of the University Senate Intercollegiate Athletics Equity and Diversity Subcommittee, Serve as the NCAA Athletics Diversity and Inclusion Designee (ADID), Serve as a member of the Big Ten Conference Inclusive Excellence Committee. His commitment to collaboration and strategic partnerships, both at the University and in our broader Twin Cities help champion all that is Maroon and Gold.

Laura Boyd | CEO, Leadership Delta

Laura Boyd has over 25 years of experience working with organizations to help them develop sustainable growth as organizations and the people within. She has been a leader on executive teams for large companies, emerging companies and non-profits, as well as a business owner. She believes Leadership is the ultimate Delta for change, strategy, and growth in an organization. She is now taking her years of experience helping businesses become high-performance organizations.

Laura has her Masters in Organizational Leadership and certification in change management. Along with her years of communications and sales success, she is perfectly suited to help any organization assess, strategize, and develop both leaders and teams for growth. She focuses her energy with professional services utilizing her years of experience as chief marketing officer for LarsonAllen (aka CliftonLarsonAllen) and business development director at Froehling Anderson.

When Laura is not working with her clients, she enjoys spending time with her busy family, coaching volleyball, working out at the gym and walking her dog. One day, she will master (well, maybe not master) the piano.

Julieta Piox | An Independent Certified Coach, Teacher, Trainer and Speaker with Maxwell Leadership Certified Team.

I pride myself on delivering inspiring, engaging, actionable, and FUN training programs that develop your leadership and that of your team’s. In my corporate career, I spent many years in marketing and communications. I then went on to learn about organizational change management and became a certified trainer for a Fortune 500 company.

It was while implementing change management for a major project, that I saw the critical importance of aligning managing change at an organizational level with managing and leading change at an individual level to ensure successful results.

Meet Our Wellness Coach

Kristina Graber | Yoga and Movement Basics for Everyone

Kristina received her BA from the University of Mn. where she studied modern dance and ballet. A dancer for Rosy Simas Dance Company in the 1990’s she continued her movement education by taking yoga classes at the Yoga House in Edina where she learned traditional Ashtanga yoga. She took her yoga and dance education to Life Time Fitness where she began teaching in 2007. In 2011 Kristina, along with her husband Bill and two kids Jon and Hollie decided to move to Singapore where she taught yoga at the Singapore American Club for two years and then moved to Boulder, Colorado where she taught yoga at the Boulder Ballet. Moving back home to Minnesota in 2016 she went back to Life Time Fitness where her yoga class became a feature format called SOUL. As an artist who is consistently moving forward Kristina, in her late 50’s left teaching at Life Time where she now takes Alpha training 3 days a week. Her latest passions include pottery at Minnetonka Center for the Arts and indoor skydiving at Ifly.

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